If you write lab reports, papers, make posters, design presentations, or make any other sort of documentation with technical chemistry language, a recent article in the Journal of Chemical Education will be of interest to you. Adam Azman of Butler University has developed a spell-check dictionary focused on chemistry lingo.

Are you sick of propargyl being marked as a misspelling? This dictionary adds propargyl and over 104,000 other correctly spelled chemistry words that are otherwise underlined with that infamous red squiggle. Personally, I know that I have just stopped looking at words underlined by the spell checker in Microsoft Office. It is incredibly frustrating to go through hundreds of “misspellings” only to find all of them were just technical words Office didn’t recognize. However, as Adam notes in his article, ignoring spell checker can (and has) led to some embarrassing misspellings of common words. Using this dictionary should take the frustration out of going through spell check and help you actually catch the mistakes.

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You can also download the dictionary from Sciencebase thanks to Adam. He contacted me at version 1, if I remember rightly before and between us we recruited ChemSpider’s Tony Williams at version 2 to create the fantastic spellcheck tool that is ver 3, which I use pretty much every day…